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Shuichi Saito (Movie)
Note: You may be looking for the original (manga) version of Shuichi Saito. That character's page is here. Shuichi Saito (斎藤秀一 Saito Shuichi) is one of the main antagonists of the 2000 film Uzumaki. He is the son of the apparently prestigious Toshio and Yukie Saito, and one of the wealthiest inhabitants of Kurôzu-Cho. Appearance This version of Shuichi is around average height and athletically built, with short straight black hair that he has gelled back and narrow dark brown eyes. His sense of fashion is quite casual and mostly green and black. He has a perpetual blank expression that only leaves when he becomes contaminated by the Spiral. After becoming contaminated by the Spiral, his eyes become blank white with no irises or pupils and his hair becomes shaggy and almost shoulder-length, reminiscent of his hair in the manga. His body elongates and turns into multiple spirals. Plot Shuichi is first seen biking home from an unknown job in Midoriyama-Shi, and he stops to pick up Kirie at a tunnel between the two towns. Kirie excitedly tries to tell him that her father has won a prize, however becomes quiet when he refuses to respond. At one point, Shuichi is yelled at by an irate Officer Futada for having two people on an apparently one-person bike. Shuichi does not respond. Later, at a swingset near Kirie's house, Kirie tries to chat about the stress caused by her math exams. When he once again doesn't respond, she asks if he's being so quiet because of university entrance exams, upon which he promptly tells Kirie that she should leave town with him, however refuses to clarify any further. Kirie is confused, and Shuichi dismisses the matter altogether. At Kirie's house, Kirie reminisces about how Shuichi had supported her when they were children, having been her closest friend and longtime crush, and also having supporter her when her mother died. However, it seemed as though even when he was very young, Shuichi refused to show emotion (or was simply incapable of doing so). In Kirie's flashback to when her mother died, young Shuichi is shown snapping at her to stop crying, however upon noticing that he was only worsening the situation, he quickly reverts to a kinder tone and says "I will be your mother, now." The next day, after Kirie presumably recalls having been traumatized by witnessing the death of a schoolmate who fell down the stairs, Shuichi explains that it was because the staircase was a spiral staircase. Kirie is confused as to how he knew this, however, Shuichi simply says "spirals," and refuses to elborate. However a few minutes later, when Kirie asks again, he clarifies that "the spiral has a mysterious power." He claims that people who are attracted to spirals will want to attract others as well, and that the boy who died did so for the attention he would receive as a result, because his mind was clouded by spirals. Kirie is once again confused, but instead of elaborating, Shuichi states ambiguously that Kurôzu-Cho is cursed and that he dislikes living there. When yet again asked to clarify, Shuichi doesn't respond. That night, Shuichi tells his mother that Toshio should go to a hospital due to his rapidly growing obsession with spirals, which had driven him to even steal the sign from a hair salon because it had a spiral on it. The next night, Shuichi and Yukie watch in annoyance as Toshio obsessively eats all the spiral fishcakes, becomes furious upon finding out that he had eaten the last of them and that there weren't any more, and then stirs his miso soup very quickly to create a whirlpool, splashing soup all over the table. After work the next day, Shuichi invites Kirie to come to his house in order to show her how strange his father has been acting. However, when they get to the Saito house, Toshio is busy attempting to beat Yukie for supposedly throwing out his collection of spirals. Shuichi angrily admits that it was him who threw them out, and Toshio demonstrates that he can now create spirals using his own body, by spinning his eyes around separately from one another. Shuichi retains his blank expression, and Kirie faints. Convinced that Toshio has gone mad, Shuichi and Yukie consult a doctor without his knowledge the next day. Kirie is instructed one night to deliver the work that Toshio had commisionned from her father, however she finds Toshio dead in a washing machine, having curled himself into a spiral, breaking all of his bones. Upon hearing her scream, Shuichi and Yukie quickly arrive at the scene. Yukie pukes, however Shuichi, still blank-faced, simply remarks that his father has become a spiral. He explains, after presumably being inquired by Kirie over his reaction, that it didn't surprise him at all. That in fact, he had been expecting this to happen. At the funeral, smoke from the crematorium turns into a spiral in the sky and assumes the ghostly face of Toshio, upon which Yukie has a mental breakdown. Shuichi makes a halfhearted attempt to calm her down. However, his attempt is futile and Yukie is admitted to the hospital as a mental patient. Shuichi and Kirie visit her, and before entering her room, Shuichi bluntly orders Kirie to leave town as soon as she can, and that it is "under the curse of the spiral." Kirie asks if he would really leave his grieving mother alone in the town, but before he can respond, a man appears and asks to speak with him. The man is a reporter called Ichiro Tamura who wishes to investigate what happened to Toshio. Shuichi is suspicious, because he had tried to cover up the strangeness of his father's death, and the general public shouldn't know that it was anything abnormal. Ichiro reveals that Toshio had come to his office weeks ago, inquiring about the history of Kurôzu-Cho, and that this was how he had figured that something abnormal had happened, as Toshio had been utterly obsessed with spirals. Ichiro admits that he had asked the police about the cause of death, and that he wanted to know why someone would commit suicide in such a gruesome manner. Shuichi does not react as Ichiro continues to talk about how he believes that Toshio's suicide has a deeper meaning and that something is going on in this town, presumably because he agrees. Later on, Shuichi and Ichiro watch what appears to have been Toshio's failed attempt to film his own suicide. Apparently unphased, Shuichi simply remarks that his father had no place using his mother's pocket mirror to film such a thing, and gives the tape to Ichiro. Later that night, Shuichi once again goes to visit his mother in the hospital, only to find that she has cut off her fingertips because of the spirals on them. The next time Shuichi and Kirie go to visit Yukie, Kirie has brought a slice of cake for her. However, Shuichi promptly throws the cake in the garbage. Realizing that he has upset Kirie, he simply states that there had been spiral-shaped frosting on it and that Yukie had developped a severe phobia of spirals. Shuichi also says that he has ordered the hospital staff to prohibit spirals to the best of their ability, however they appear not to have listened. Kirie is terrified upon seeing that Yukie has shaved her head and mutilated her fingers, however Shuichi remains unphased. However, before any conversation can be made, Shuichi is called to the front desk on the ground floor, where he calls Ichiro, who presumably has found some sort of important information about the town and spirals. Ichiro tells Shuichi to meet up with him by Dragonfly Pond. Upon exiting the hospital, Shuichi sees that there is an anatomical poster still up on the wall showing the spiral-shaped cochlea in the ear. He promptly tears it off the wall and crumples it up, explaining simply to an outraged Kirie that there was a spiral on it. On the way to meet up with Ichiro, Shuichi notices that Kirie has stopped walking and goes to scold her, only to notice that Mitsuru Yamaguchi is blocking their way. Mitsuru begins complaining about Kirie's refusal to date him, gestures to Shuichi, and yells "you've been treating me like crap for this guy? Who even is he?" Outraged, Shuichi attempts to attack Mitsuru, however Mitsuru shoves him aside. Before Shuichi can start a fight in earnest, Mitsuru runs off into traffic "to make Kirie remember him forever." He is hit by Ichiro's car, which causes Ichiro to lose control and drive into a post, and both Mitsuru and Ichiro are killed. That night, as Kirie reminesces about how Shuichi used to convince her that there was a monster in Dragonfly Pond waiting to kill her, Shuichi declares that he will protect Kirie from spirals. Yukie kills herself upon finding out about the spirals in her ears. At her funeral, two women discuss the disturbingness of how people who are cremated in Kurôzu-Cho become black spirals, then the younger points out that you can see a face in the smoke-spiral this time, too, as you could when Toshio (and impliedly many others) died. Both women are roughly shoved aside by Shuichi, whose blank expression momentarily falters at the sight of the faces of both his parents appearing inside the smoke. After watching a reporter called Chie Maruyama do a story on Kurôzu-Cho on TV, Shuichi flatly claims that the town is as good as dead, along with everyone in it. He then proceeds to glare at Kirie until she finally agrees to run away with him, on the condition that her dad can come too. The two set out to get Kirie's dad, but can't find him anywhere. They go to the shack where he made his pottery, however Shuichi trips and seems to mysteriously disappear upon entering. Kirie is distracted by the deformed spiral pottery she finds in her father's shack, until Shuichi blankly tells her that he is also infected with spirals. He dies in Kirie's arms, however comes back to life as a spiral and attacks her. He is never seen after this except in a short clip during a sequence showing the damage done to Kurôzu-Cho. Quotes "You shoudn't do things like that." "It doesn't come as a surprise to me, frankly." "Kirie, who the hell is this guy?" Trivia * He is widely considered a complete flip of his manga counterpart. * The person who portrayed him (Fhi Fan) is in fact not an actor, and had no acting experience prior to this movie or after Higuchinsky's next movie, Nagai Yume.